Chris RageBoy Locke — whom, btw, has posted a knockout portfolio of his Web design work — points out in an email that pages Google translates automatically now let any reader suggest a better translation. So, if you go about a third of the way down this page and look for the first book cover, you’ll see a work by Alan De Benoist, titled “On Being a Floyd.” Hover over the title and you’ll see “On Being a Pagan” in a popup, with a button for you to suggest your own alternative translation. RageBoy is the one who suggested “On Being a Pagan.” Chris refers to Google’s approach as “wide area knowledge acquisition.”

If evil-ass spammers start translating Rilke’s poetry into Viagra ads, then Google will have to come up with some social way of monitoring the reader-contributed translations. But this is another instance of the 1% rule: A tiny percentage of people can make the world better for all the rest. And it’s pretty darn cool. [Tags: ragrboy translation google everything_is_miscellaneous]

5 Responses to “Distributed translation”

Are you sure about this? In the original Russian-language page the title is given (in English) as “On being a Pagan”; “Floyd” seems to have been inserted in translation. The hover text isn’t ChrisL’s contribution, it’s just the original wording – which in this case happens to be in English.

Why Google translates the word ‘pagan’ as ‘Floyd’ is another question; it only seems to do this if the source language is Russian.